Just playing devil's advocate for a bit: the horror of your Bisquick scenario depends in part on the assumption that salt, flour, etc are fungible across applications, which is not quite true. Flour, sugar, and probably other trace ingredients for managing texture benefit from using different types in different recipes. If any of those benefit from economies of scale, it could well be optimal in some sense to have mixes for everything. This is much closer to being true in software, where different circumstances demand different concrete implementations of abstractions like, say, "scheduler" (analogous to grade/type of abstract ingredient like "flour").

Ed: I should say, I really like this metaphor, and I expect it will crop up in my thinking in the future.